Ministry of Science and Technology Awards Major Grant for METROPOLIS Urban Digital Twin
The Architectural Artificial Intelligence Research Lab has been awarded a major grant from the Ministry of Science and Technology to advance METROPOLIS, an urban digital twin project developed with Tel Aviv.
Cities face growing pressure to address sustainable growth, climate resilience, energy efficiency, mobility, and social inclusion — often with limited capacity to evaluate the consequences of decisions before they are made.
Urban digital twins can in principle connect real-time data, historical records, and predictive AI models into a shared environment for urban analysis and scenario testing. In practice, however, their deployment remains limited. Urban data is fragmented across agencies and formats, AI models require heterogeneous and often incompatible inputs, and cities lack the workflow orchestration and benchmarking infrastructure needed to integrate these components into coherent planning workflows.
METROPOLIS addresses these barriers directly. The framework contributes a data interoperability engine, a modular interface for deploying urban AI models, pipelines for orchestrating multi-model scenarios, and benchmarks for comparing model performance across cities and planning contexts. Decision-support interfaces are designed for use by planning practitioners, not only researchers.
The project will be validated through a pilot deployment with the City of Tel Aviv, assessing technical performance, usability for planning workflows, and replicability for other municipal contexts. METROPOLIS does not aim to produce a single predictive tool — it aims to build the infrastructure that makes urban AI research and practice more cumulative and interoperable.
Learn more about the METROPOLIS project.